Hellllloooooooo Dorothy and Toto!

Oh yeahhhhhhhh! We finally made it to Kansas! It’s been a long haul in Colorado- beautiful- but long. Starting with Satchmo being injured, not sure if we would be able to continue, being given Chance, crossing the Rockies, resting for a while from that, and getting going again…… But here we are in a new state! AND.. it’s Chance’s first state line crossing! He has officially earned his wings!

We had the strangest goodbye from Colorado – an attack owl! It flew down off the stadium from an old racetrack right towards us. I watched it fly and turned sideways to see it go by behind me. It was huge, so well worth watching. But it didn’t just fly by us- it flew through the trees right at Richard’s head! Satchmo jumped, Richard ducked, and the owl looked surprised too! It literally missed flying into Richard’s head by about 2 feet. And he didn’t just zoom by, he put on the brakes like he was not expecting this obstacle and flapped around a bit to change course. It looked like a winged frenzy for a moment- all in Richard’s face! He said he got an up close and personal look at his face and into his eyes, then felt the wind of his wings as it flew off! We watched it go in astonishment to see it get hit by a car… slide up the windshield, flutter around a bit, and fly off like nothing happened! I have no idea what that owl was ‘on’, but he was crazy!

Then we saw a very excited border collie come flying down a fenceline, out the opening, and over to us. We tried to send him home, but he insisted on following….. for miles. We thought for sure he was going to escort us to the Kansas border! I finally got off to see if his tags had a phone number, and when I called him over he acted like he was going to be in big trouble- so he ran off back towards home! It was only a couple miles to the border.

On our way through Holly, our last Colorado town, we met a wonderful gal named Kelly who took pictures of us going through her town so she could send an article into her small town paper, then met us at the border to take pictures for us.

We chuckled once again at the Colorado border sign being all brown but exclaiming “welcome to colorful Colorado!” It truly was our most colorful and picturesque state, but we turned our heads to look forward to our next state…. KANSAS!

We have already had an overwhelming welcome to Kansas. Several papers got wind of us, we have heard report that we’ve been on the radio, and the Kansas Horse Council sent out an email to hundreds of people which has resulted in us getting happily buried in emails and phone calls of invitations to homes in Kansas! Wow! That’s a pretty good first impression!